Lexington Community Education presents: An Evening with Lewis Hyde: Common As Air, Who Should Own An Idea?

How should the rights of thinkers, inventors and artists to profit from their creations be balanced with the need for society to benefit from them? Where should boundaries between private and public ownership of ideas be drawn? In his most recent book “Common As Air,” poet, essayist, and cultural critic Lewis Hyde examines the issue of intellectual property versus the “cultural commons,” the vast store of art and ideas inherited from the past.  Turning to the wit and wisdom of Franklin, Adams, Madison and Jefferson for inspiration, Hyde argues for full access to all forms of knowledge, and against today’s narrow debates over cultural ownership. Hyde writes that for America’s founders, democratic self-governance itself demanded open and easy access to ideas, as did the growth of creative and scientific communities, and the flourishing of public persons whose “civic virtue” brought the nation into being. In his lively and carefully argued book, Hyde sheds fresh light on everything from the Human Genome Project to Bob Dylan’s musical roots. In it he outlines a vision of how to reclaim the commonwealth of art and ideas that we were meant to inherit. “Common As Air” was a New York Times “notable” book for 2010, and Hyde was the winner of the Boston Authors Club Julia Ward Howe award, best book of 2010 by a Boston author. Hyde’s other prose includes the much reprinted essay “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking”, The Gift, and Trickster Makes This World. He has edited the essays of Henry D. Thoreau and a volume of critical responses to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. Milkweed Editions has published a book of his poems, This Error is the Sign of Love. For six years Hyde taught writing at Harvard University where, in his last year, he was director of the creative writing faculty. He has taught at Kenyon College since 1989 where he is currently the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing.